Why do you suppose he said this? People didn't have Bacon's method, but people had eyes, and accumulated experience.

Sure. I think al-Zharawi got observational evidence, but I think that there are systematic defects in how humans collect data from observation, which makes observational judgments naturally suspect. That is, I'm happy to take "al-Zharawi says X" as a good reason to promote X as a hypothesis worthy of testing, but I am more confident in reality's entanglement with test results than proposed hypotheses.

"Science" isn't this thing that came on a beam of light once Bacon finished his writings. Humans had bits and pieces of science right for a long time (heck my favorite citation is a two arm nutrition trial in the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament).

I very much agree that science is some combination of methodology and principles which was gradually discovered by humans, and categorically unlike revealed knowledge, whose core goal is the creation of maps that describe the territory as closely and correctly as possible. (To be clear, science in this view is not 'having that goal,' but actions and principles that actually lead to achieving that goal.)

We can ask a doc, but I am pretty sure post-wound gangrene is basically fatal if untreated.

I asked history.stackexchange; we'll see if that produces anything useful. Asking doctors is also a good idea, but I don't have as easy an in for that.

What is not science? My direct experience with peer review?

Not quite--what I had in mind as "not science" was confusing your direct experience with peer review and evaluation of the intentions as a scientific case for peer review.

Note that I am only talking about peer review I am familiar with.

Right now, sure, but we got onto this point because you thought not publishing with peer review means we can't be sure MIRI isn't wasting donor money, which makes sense primarily if we're confident in peer review in MIRI's field.

I expect gwern's policy of being really angry on the internet is going to have either a zero effect or a mildly negative effect on the problem.

Eh. While I agree that being angry on the internet is unsightly, it's not obvious to me that it's ineffective at accomplishing useful goals.

I am making the claim that people who want to burn the whole system to the ground need to realize that academia is very large, and has very different social norms in different corners.

"Whole system" seems unclear. It's pretty obvious to me that gwern wants to kill a specific element for solid reasons, as evidenced by the following quotes:

What makes science work is replication and putting your work out there for community evaluation. Those are the real review by peers. ...

Yes, I have no objection to 'peer review' if by what you mean is all the things I singled out as opposed to, and prior to, and afterwards, the institution of peer review: having colleagues critique your work, having many other people with different perspectives & knowledge check it over and replicate it and build on it and post essays rebutting it - all this is great stuff, we both agree. I would say replication is the most important of those elements, but all have their place.

What I am attacking is the very specific formal institutional practice of journals outsourcing editorial judgment to a few selected researchers and effectively giving them veto power, a process which hardly seems calculated to yield very good results and which does not seem to have been institutionalized because it has been rigorously demonstrated to work far better than the pre-existing alternatives